


You Were Only Waiting

by melonbug



Series: If This Be the End, Then So Shall it Be [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Astral Plane, Grief, M/M, Post canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-13
Updated: 2017-05-13
Packaged: 2018-10-31 12:10:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10899078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melonbug/pseuds/melonbug
Summary: The moment came and then it went. Shiro, maybe, would be lost to them forever.A prequel to "Like Real People Do," but it can also stand alone.





	You Were Only Waiting

Matt dreamed of seeing Shiro again. He had heard the stories— who hadn’t?— first from the murmured whispers of the Champion and then to the grandiose tales of the Black Paladin, spoken with bright eyes and the kind of hope the universe badly needed.

In his dreams he stood in rapture as the Black Lion descended and Shiro stepped from within, smiling as he did in Matt’s memories.

Reality was different: it wasn’t Shiro that stepped from the Black Lion but someone far less familiar: A woman, tall, with a wild flow of white hair. It was the Princess, the last of the Alteans. Now the pilot of the Black Lion.

Nothing was said of Shiro.

Matt waited a week before he finally asked about it. He hadn’t missed the way all of the other paladins skirted the subject, and he felt hesitant to voice the welling anxiety that had settled deep in his stomach. Something was wrong, and Matt wasn’t sure what. For a torturous week he found himself caught somewhere between mourning and relief. As long as they went on dancing around the subject, he didn’t have to face it. He didn’t have to accept his grief and he could keep going as he had done the first time he’d lost Shiro.

As long as he didn’t know, he couldn’t mourn, and so that grief, instead, weighed him down. He couldn’t mourn without the truth, but without the truth there was no mourning to be had. Something had to give.

He asked Allura about it, finally, when he was ready to explode with the agitation, when the excitement of his arrival, of settling in, of seeing Katie again, had worn itself away. There were no distractions left, there was only the absence of Shiro, screaming loud at him as he walked the halls. Shiro had walked these halls, once.

Shiro was gone.

Her eyes were sad when he asked, and he swallowed. He knew.

“Would you like to see him?” she asked softly. Her eyes met his and they were strong. Everyone grieved differently.

Matt considered her question. Did he want to see Shiro? Did he want to be faced with the reality of his death, however it would be presented to him? In cryo, he assumed, and finally, because he needed to, one last time, he nodded.

Allura, instead, led him to the Black Lion. Matt stood in it’s shadow, as he had when it had first touched down in front of him, and he felt overwhelmed. It was powerful, and every moment he was reminded of the power of the paladins and of their connection to the Lions. But this wasn’t Shiro, really, no matter how bonded he had been to Black.

“Give me your hands,” Allura said. She held out her own, palms up, and he hesitated for only a moment before he placed his atop them. They were rougher than his, even with all of the fighting he had done. It was the small things like this that reminded him she was not the same as he was. She wasn’t human. She hummed with a strength he would never have where his hands met hers.

“Close your eyes,” Allura continued.

Matt did as he was asked and he was met with the feeling of freefall, the sick drop of the world from beneath him. It was a feeling that was familiar. All over he tingled with the power poured forth by Allura, stronger than it had been, and it buried itself in his mind, just behind his eyes, and made him lightheaded.

The freefall became a plummet and before a scream could tear itself from his lips his feet touched solid ground, gently, as if he had not been falling to begin with. Even with his eyes closed, Matt knew at once he was no longer where it had been. Allura’s hands left his and he wrenched his eyes open.

All around him was space; Stars spun their way across the sky, purple and ethereal. The surface he stood on was indeed solid, but only where his feet touched it. Beneath it was the void of space. Matt looked down at his hands and they were hued with the same purple as the stars. They were soft around the edges, no longer quite as real as they had been.

“This is the astral plane,” Allura whispered. Her voice floated out like the stars; it transcended reality. They met his ears the way mist drifted through the air. He jerked his head up to look at her, startled, eyes only on the glow her silhouette had taken on. It was all that was left of her, it was all that was— “Take a deep breath,” she cut in suddenly. She shifted back to what she had been before. A glow became a dim, a blur became solidity.

He took a deep breath.

Allura touched his hand again and again he jumped. Already he had forgotten himself one more. Her eyes were serious as they met his. For a moment nothing had existed but he and the stars. “It is all too easy to lose oneself in this place.” She gazed out into the darkness. “Focus on a thought and do not let it leave you.”

He nodded weakly. It was her hair that drew his attention, stark and white where everything else was touched with the faint lull of purple. It hung about the air is if floating in a sea. “Okay,” he said. He closed his eyes and then opened him, and remembered: none of this was real.

Allura tugged his hand. “Come along.”

He followed after her and all the while his gaze never left her hair. Until suddenly Shiro was  _ there _ , where a second before there had nothing been the black, endless fog. Matt shook at the sight of him; He sat cross legged, and he looked as if he hovered above the world below them. His head was tilted up, as if looking at the stars. His eyes were closed to them. A flock of white hair hung in the hair about his head.

He had the same blur around the edges that both Matt and Allura had, only more so. He looked somewhere close to blurring out of existence.

Matt thought of what Allura had said.  _ It was all too easy to lose oneself in this place _ . Shiro embodied that. Shiro was lost to this place.

He didn’t need to ask Allura for clarification. He  _ knew _ .

Allura turned her eyes on him. "He is alive."

Matt felt bile rise in his throat. He swallowed it down and focused on a thought before his vision could drift back into nothingness. He focused on the scar on Shiro’s face. It hurt Matt to see it, to image what might have caused it. The hurt kept him grounded.

“Nothing is holding him here but himself,” Allura explained. “But we have tried, and we can not pull him away from this place.” He could hear the exhaustion of it in her voice. How long had it been? Years, maybe. He could count them in the lines of his own face, like the rings of a tree. He had had no other way to track the passage of time.

“Can he hear us?” Matt asked at last. He was careful not to pull his eyes from Shiro. It hurt his heart and he wanted to scream, to throw himself down at him and beg him back to life.

“I am not certain,” Allura told him. She was wistful and Matt didn’t doubt that she and the others had spent too much time trying. He had only just been faced with this, but the others had faced years of this. All of them were powerless to do anything, even as close to him as the were. Matt felt sick.

Careful to keep his eyes only on Shiro’s face, Matt dropped down to the ground, mirroring Shiro. Allura joined him, tucking her knees beneath herself.

“If there is anything you have ever wanted to say to him, you should say it now.” She lifted her gaze the stars above them and they painted dark freckles across her face. “I do not know how much longer he will be here. Everytime I come to this place I expect he will be gone.” She looked at Matt. He caught it from his periphery and he fidgeted his hands in his lap. “Of course, I come less and less now. This is not a place one should ever linger in for long.”

Matt could feel as much. Even now the black around him tugged at him. They were nothing but souls in this place, tethered only by a thread to their own world. Shiro’s tether, Matt decided, was broken.

“Shiro?” Matt tried. He wasn’t certain what he had expected, but he was met with nothing. Allura shifted beside him. Matt wondered what her thought was, that kept her from blowing away like dust into this place.

Matt didn’t know what else to say, how else to continue. He had spent so many nights laying awake, imaging all of the things he would say to Shiro when he finally saw him again. There were regrets that could not be made undone by words alone, but now words were all he had. It was him and a ghost of the Shiro he had known.

It hardly seemed fair to pour his confessions out onto him as if he were nothing more than a false idol of the person he really longed for.

“I love you,” Matt blurted out. He could feel the pinprick of tears. “I— I’ve loved you since our Garrison days, since the first time I saw you fly and you—” It was Matt’s strongest memory, the one that got him through the worst times. “You landed and you looked at me. You were breathless and in all of the time I’d known you I had never seen you look so happy.” He had looked alive and, in those days, it was the feeling they clung to against the reality of the Garrison. They were training for war and there were only a lucky few who were spared from that.

Shiro and Matt had been among those lucky few. War could never be avoided, though. Even in the far reaches of the universe, it’s horror bled itself to life. In the end, they had been trading one war for something much worse.

Shiro was free from it all now. Matt new little about the astral plane, but he could feel it tug at him, the relief of nothingness. The knowledge that if he just closed his eyes and let himself go there would never again be pain or sadness. He would be free, as free as one could get without dying. This transcended death.

Maybe Matt could lose himself too. Maybe he could close his eyes and spend eternity here with Shiro.

Then Shiro moved, the moment Matt felt his eyes flutter closed. His breath caught in his throat and he choked on it. Beside him, Allura let out a gasp. Matt dared to look her way and she had a hand pressed to her mouth. Something that was maybe tears sparkled in her eyes. 

When he looked back to Shiro, Shiro’s eyes were open. They glowed, a faint spot of brightness in the bleakness of the plane. They met Matt’s and Shiro’s lips twitched into a fond smile. It was the smile Matt remembered, from all the days before.

“Matt,” Shiro breathed. His breath ghosted the air. “I remember you.”

For a second Matt thought this was losing himself; All of his dreams made real in the veil of the plane. Allura’s hand found his knee and squeezed it and he blinked away the errant thought. This was reality. This was him and Allura. This was Shiro, in front of them, smiling.

"I remember you," Shiro said again. "I loved you." The words tumbled from his lips, his voice raw from disuse. He moved forward and shifted onto his knees and he reached for Matt. He stopped halfway through, glancing down at his own hand. It was aglow with return of life.

"May I?" he asked.

Matt nodded, throat tight.

Shiro pressed a hand to his cheek and Matt gasped, leaning into it. His hand was cold with the chill of space, as soft as it was around the edges. It whispered with a power that made Matt shudder and raised goosebumps across his skin.

"I remember you," Shiro said again with finality.

Allura spoke, finally. "Shiro," she said. "Shiro, we need you to come home."

He looked at her and nodded. "Yeah," he said. "I think it's time."


End file.
